BatesNews: April 2013

Olivia Norrmen-Smith ’13 will use her Watson Fellowship, among the most coveted award at highly selective liberal arts colleges, to travel to Africa and Asia to understand the cultural perceptions of medical stroke, one of humankind’s leading causes of death and disability.

The single fee for 2013–14, covering tuition, room, board and fees, is $58,950 and represents a 3 percent increase over 2012–13, the lowest fee increase in more than four decades. Forty-four percent of Bates students qualify for financial aid, and the college delivers financial aid packages that meet 100 percent of each student’s demonstrated need.

Just a reminder that Bates Magazine stories are always available online, including the Winter 2013 edition, with a new profile of Benjamin Mays ’20 — April 9 being the 45th anniversary of his eulogy for the slain Martin Luther King Jr. — plus photographs from three young alumni and the cover story about training your brain to handle what’s known as “eco-anxiety.”

Getting students to think like anthropologists, says Loring Danforth, winner of the 2013 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, means getting them to see and admit the cultural underpinnings of their beliefs and interests. Although the process “can be really agonizing” for students, Danforth says, the intensity means “you’re hitting on something really important and interesting.”

What is nature, who gets to decide its fate and why? And how can those who are excluded from environmental governance get some say? Sonja Pieck’s excellence in trying to answer those questions, through her teaching and her South America–focused research, is why she’s been promoted to associate professor of environmental studies, with tenure.

Since winter seems to be hanging on for dear life, why not share this audio slide show, produced late in the ski season by photographer and videographer Michael Bradley, featuring Avril Dunleavy ’15 of Salt Lake City and Emily Bamford ’15 of East Melbourne, Australia talking about life as Bobcat alpine skier.

With a winning NESCAC record so far this spring, men’s lacrosse is something of a bookend to the other resurgent men’s sport in 2012-13, that being football and its 5-3 season last fall. Sports Information Director Andy Walter says success follows the familiar formula of combining something old and something new.

Here in Maine, Doug Hodgkin, emeritus professor of political science, compares the attitudes of Maine voters who favor gun rights with those who favor gun control, and marine biologist Will Ambrose explains the biology and the sociology of a dispute between worm diggers and clam diggers. In Chicago, Postell Pringle ’98 is wowing audiences as Othello in a sizzling hip-hop adaptation of the play.